WSJ wins dismissal of Trump's $10 billion defamation suit

Erik Larson, Bloomberg News on Oct 31, 2026

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A federal judge threw out Donald Trump’s renewed $10 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal and ruled that it can’t be filed again, marking another setback for the president’s legal fights with the media.

Judge Darrin Gayles in Miami on Saturday granted the Journal’s request to dismiss the suit. The newspaper was accused in the complaint of defaming Trump in an article saying that Trump once sent a suggestive birthday letter to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Gayles first tossed the suit in April for lacking evidence, but he gave Trump a chance to file a new one with beefed-up claims. Trump in May filed the new version, which the Journal argued was not an improvement.

The judge, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, said Trump was “grasping at straws” by arguing that the Journal failed to properly investigate the story, citing the journalists’ extensive reporting. Gayles also rejected Trump’s argument that the Journal shouldn’t have published the letter after he denied that he wrote the birthday note to Epstein.

“Indeed, were that the law, any time a public figure or his team denies an accusation, journalists would be immediately blocked from publishing negative or contradictory press — a result that flies in the face” of the First Amendment, the judge wrote.

“Moreover, the article did not ignore or minimize President Trump’s denial. Rather, it informed readers that President Trump decried the Letter as a fake and denied writing it,” the judge added.

The decision is a major win for the Journal, parent company News Corp. and Chairman Emeritus Rupert Murdoch — all defendants in the suit. They argued in their request to dismiss the case that the article was accurate and that Trump filed the suit to try to chill criticism of him in the media.

“We’re pleased with the court’s decision,” a spokesperson for Dow Jones & Co. Inc., which owns The Wall Street Journal, said in a statement.

A spokesman for Trump’s legal team signaled the president will appeal the ruling. “President Trump will continue to press forward in his powerhouse lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal and all of the other defendants,” the spokesman said.

The case is part of a series of lawsuits that Trump or his business interests have filed since he retook the White House last year, including multibillion-dollar complaints against The New York Times and the British Broadcasting Corp. Several of the suits have hit snags recently. A judge on July 2 dismissed a $3.8 billion defamation case that was filed against the Washington Post by Trump’s social media company.

The judge ruled that as with his first lawsuit, Trump had failed to show the Journal acted with “actual malice,” the legal standard for public figures prove defamation. The standard, established by the U.S. Supreme Court decades ago to protect press freedom, requires that public figures show the publication knew that a disputed statement was false or recklessly disregarded the possibility it might be untrue.

Trump sued over a July 2025 story that said he’d sent a “bawdy” birthday note to the disgraced financier in 2003, typed within a sketched outline of a naked woman and signed with the president’s signature in the pubic area. The note ends with: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

Trump, who says he never knew about Epstein’s sexual misconduct and cut ties with him before it became public, has repeatedly claimed the note is fake.

In the revised suit, Trump alleged it was a “glaring omission” for The Wall Street Journal to fail to explain why the birthday note had been written in the third person, why it was typed and by whom, and how the news outlet obtained it.

The judge disagreed, saying in Saturday’s ruling that the argument “does not save his claims.”

“How or why the voiceover in the letter was typewritten or how the voiceover was confirmed to be in the third person are inconsequential details that have no bearing on whether defendants published the article knowing its contents were false or with reckless disregard as to its falsity,” the judge wrote.

(Skylar Woodhouse contributed to this report.)